Needing to quickly install a web server on a Windows PC, I was drawn into looking for a free software suite providing such sevrices in a simple and nice package.
I already knew EasyPHP from Emmanuel Faivre, Laurent Abbal and Thierry Murail, three Frenchmen who put in a single tool box all the free open-source tools really needed for this:
- an Apache server
- the PHP language
- a mySQL database
- a few tools that makes nice complements to it:
- PHPMyAdmin
- SQLiteManager
It is always possible to grab them independently and to install them by yourself, but it’s such a pleasure to do this in a single simple move on your PC!
But, I was told that there is a competing solution, WAMP from PHPteam. After reading in the forums that WAMP seems much simpler to install on a Windows PC than EasyPHP, I decided to test WAMP.
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Please notice: WAMP is the Windows version of LAMP, a similar tool dedicated to GNU/Linux. |
In a few words, I can confirm the ease of deployment. The installation program is perfectly up to the level of what is normally epxected from a Windows pro installer. User choices are clear, well described and easy to understand, supposing that you know about the general issue (we are installing a web server, not yet another mini-calendar XP application…). And, there lies the only problem with WAMP (but it’s shared with EasyPHP): If they allow you to work with tools that are well known to a specialized public, don’t really believe that you could install your own server without first understanding the issues at hand with Apache, mySQL or PHP.
Nevertheless, the overall feeling I got from WAMP is even more favorable than with EasyPHP. Even better, in both cases, the support is very significant in several language (most notably in English and French). I know that this is a prerequisite for some of our readers.